La Méridionale entrusted the maintenance of its business applications to the agency bluedrop.fr in May 2020. Beyond just maintenance, we took part in the design and development of new tools, always using Symfony. We invite you to take a look back at these various projects.
Since its creation in 1931, La Compagnie Méridionale de Navigation has continually evolved to become La Méridionale. La Méridionale operates a daily freight and passenger transport service between Corsica and the mainland, thus ensuring Territorial Continuity as part of its Public Service mission. In 2020, the shipping company launched a regular Marseille-Tanger Med route. It operates 4 crossings to Morocco per week and up to 6 during the summer season.
La Méridionale is:
- 4 combined vessels to Corsica and Morocco departing from Marseille;
- 12 weekly crossings between Marseille and Corsica and 4 to 6 weekly crossings between Marseille and Morocco;
- 1,000 travel agencies forming a distribution network throughout Europe;
- 500 staff, at sea and on land, serving customers;
- 100,000 passengers and 41,000 cars in 2020;
- 25,500 heavy goods vehicles, totaling 27 km of freight transported in 2020.
May 2020 – Resuming maintenance of the company’s Freight Management extranet
In May 2020, La Méridionale asked us to urgently take over the maintenance of their freight management extranet. Following the consultation and an initial audit, they entrusted us with rapidly handling the maintenance of a Symfony application with several thousand lines! In addition to mastering this technical complexity, our teams needed to understand the issues specific to maritime freight operations... Workshops followed one another, teams collaborated, and we succeeded in supporting the environment migrations and taking over extranet maintenance.
This extranet covers the entire freight business: prospecting, booking, information about crossings, management and printing of travel documents, vehicle crossing history, tax calculations, issuing driver tickets, billing, constraints related to vehicle lengths, customer management, charge codes, contracts, fuel pricing, incident management, uploading photos of damages... As well as all connectors needed for dockside boarding, accounting entries, customs registrations, etc.
However, one issue remained... The application we took over was running on a deprecated version of Symfony. So our first task was to upgrade the entire application to Symfony 4.4.
September 2020 > May 2021 – Freight extranet upgraded from Symfony 2.8.52 to Symfony 4.4
This upgrade kept a team busy for 6 months. While the technical work was complex, the testing involving all project stakeholders was even more demanding. Deployment finally took place on May 19, 2021. We can now continue maintaining the application on a current, maintained version of Symfony. We are now also able to reassure the teams managing the extranet site.
September 2021 – Enhancing the Freight extranet to meet international transport requirements
From spring 2021, La Méridionale’s IT teams informed us of their requirement to enrich their freight management application for international transport. Until now only handling crossings between the mainland and Corsica, La Méridionale has just started rotations between Marseille and Tangier.
This new destination means new requirements must be addressed (notably around police, customs, but also billing). The project team must therefore design new workflows that, among other things, interface with an industry-leading business application. The design and drafting of functional specifications phase is now almost complete. We expect this enhanced version to go live in January 2022.
Meanwhile... other Symfony projects...
June 2020 – Maintenance takeover for a mobile passenger check-in management app
In June 2020, alongside the maintenance takeover of the freight extranet, La Méridionale also asked us to maintain and enhance a Symfony application used for passenger check-in at the dock. This application runs on a portable device connected to a portable thermal printer. It allows the scanning of a reservation barcode (or entering its number) to print boarding passes before embarkation.
The maintenance work consisted of getting to grips with the development environment, which was more unusual than traditional web development. As well as resolving some bugs following changes in hosting environments, we also:
- Upgraded Symfony (to version 4.4);
- Modified the connector to the crossing management API after a provider change.
April 2021 – Design and development of a mobile real-time boarding tracking interface (Symfony)
Alongside Symfony maintenance and enhancement projects, La Méridionale wanted our teams to design and develop a new mobile application. This application allows authorized or sailing users to view real-time vessel occupancy data.
How it works:
- When the app is launched, a form prompts the user to log in.
- Once logged in, the user chooses to display either “Freight” or “Passenger” readiness data. When the relevant page opens, the data is updated.
- The data updates automatically.
- The user can track metrics on the progress of boarding on their crossing.
Result:
While waiting for the next rollouts, we commend our Symfony developers for their work, and of course the La Méridionale team for their collaboration.
> See the case study
We entrusted the bluedrop.fr agency team with the ongoing and corrective maintenance of a very complex maritime freight management extranet, without being able to provide a knowledge transfer with the previous maintenance company. The team took on this challenge and is improving the effectiveness of this maintenance a little more every day.
Satisfied with our collaboration, we have worked and are working on new projects together.
Christian Saurat, Director of Information Systems (CIO).
The Méridionale
For more information, you can consult our case study on the subject.
